“REES Mogg Supports Conservative Candidate”, read a BBC headline last week. When it becomes headline news that a Tory MP is supporting his own party in an election, you know that the game is up.

If anyone still needed persuading that the Tories had lost the plot, along with the rest of the UK political classes, it was seeing them all line up last week to launch their campaigns to elect members of a parliament they don't intend to sit in. The European elections are not only undermining faith in democracy, as the Electoral Commission made clear last week. This fiasco has handed the populist right with the best political opportunity they could wish for.

Remainers were appalled to see a triumphalist Nigel Farage dominating BBC's Question Time, revelling in his moral authority. Better get used to it, because we'll be seeing an awful lot of the Brexit Party leader over the next few weeks, as the other parties scuttle around in his wake. He is the victor in the European election campaign even before it has started, having already destroyed his old vehicle, Ukip and turned the Conservative Party into also rans.

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He realised before anyone else that this was going to be the very repeat referendum that Remainers like the Tory MP Anna Soubry had been agitating for in parliament. That's why Mr Farage seized the key word, “Brexit”, and owned it. His is the only party that has a recognisable identity that allows Leave supporters to know where to place their votes. The Remain parties are hopelessly divided and their message confused.

The Tiggers, Independents, Change UK or whatever Soubry's party is called this week, have been all over the place, bereft of policies and losing candidates because of offensive social media posts. The Liberal Democrats launched the worst election slogan I've ever seen, “Bollocks to Brexit”, in the hands of their worst-ever leader, Vince Cable.

Smart young metropolitans might appreciate the homage to the Sex Pistols, but for most provincial voters it looks like coarse language. Imagine if Labour tried a slogan like “Testicles to the Tories”? Or the Scottish Tories had said: “Sturgeon's Pure Sh***”. The LibDems also made the fatal mistake of name-checking their opponents, by featuring the B-word in all campaign literature.

Mind you, Labour's campaign slogan after their launch last week should have been hauled before the advertising standards authority: “Bringing our country back together again”. Well they could start by bringing their party back together. No-one knows whether Labour is a Remain party posing as a Brexit one, or vice versa. In a sense it doesn't matter because no-one would believe them either way.

Jeremy Corbyn has been trying to keep Leavers on board by pretending to hold negotiations with Theresa May on Brexit, while holding a sign behind his back reading “we really want a referendum, honest”. This studied ambiguity may have worked while the Tory party was engaged in a demolition derby in Parliament, but it isn't going to work on the stump. Voters will want to know whether they're voting for party intending to honour the referendum or for one intent on remaining in the EU after a referendum. Labour will need two speakers on every platform: one for the pro-Brexit leadership, and another for Keir Starmer and the People's Vote.

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The Tories would probably be better not to campaign at all. There will be at least two rival Conservative Parties in this campaign, and it will take a superhuman act of will to stop them tearing lumps out of each other. And of course there is a Tory leadership race threatening to overshadow the entire contest. When has there ever been an election campaign in which the governing party has already disowned its leader?

The Hunts, Raabs, and Hancocks have all been preening themselves in photo ops with their wives as accessories. Meanwhile the big fish, like Boris Johnson, have been parading themselves around the country stirring up apathy. Theresa May has been hiding in Downing Street with her head in that bucket of sand that's kept in the basement for Prime Ministers who cannot cope with reality.

The SNP have probably the easiest ride. Though even in Remain-voting Scotland these phoney elections are problematic. All is not well in he Scottish National Party, and there is open grumbling about the leader’s campaign for a referendum on Brexit is overshadowing the campaign for a Scottish independence referendum. You know, the one Nicola Sturgeon was supposed to have launched at her conference a week or so ago. Her failure to show any obvious support for the recent vast independence marches is causing immense frustration in the wider Yes movement, while the SNP leader “cuddles up to Alastair Campbell at anti-Brexit demos” as the left wing nationalist Jonathon Shafi put it.

Everyone is wondering how Nigel Farage lives such a charmed political life, as he flits from party to party, hob-nobbing with Donald Trump and dark-side populists like Steve Bannon. But the secret of his success is obvious: the other parties have made Nigel Farage. He revels in the abuse of the left, who call him a racist and neofascist, and try to get him banned from the BBC and social media. “Shows they’re rattled”.

He knows that the Brexit Party is the only one with a compelling story to tell voters. That the British voters were betrayed, and that a Remain parliament has defied the democratic wish of the people to become an independent country. It's the ordinary folk against the cosy elites. Tell them again!

Disingenuous it may be – you don't get much more elite than this former investment banker. And it is arguably Farage's mates in the DUP and the Tory right who've prevented Brexit happening by rejecting the prime minister's negotiated Brexit withdrawal deal. Farage himself, as was pointed out, talked of having a deal after Brexit along the lines of Norway and Switzerland.

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But none of that matters now. He got out of the gates first, and has placed himself at the head of a Trump-style populist revolt that is threatening to dominate UK politics in the coming decade, as the political writer, Lewis Goodall has forecast. Farage now has ambitions far beyond winning an election to a parliament he loathes. The Brexit Party is already accumulating candidates and cash for a UK general election in which Farage hopes to be a major player.

Even in Scotland, the Brexit Party is in line to get a European seat, though he is unlikely to do much campaigning here. Such is the dysfunctional state of the established parties, they'll probably end up doing Farage's job for him. Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Tory leader, is already smarting from Boris Johnson appearing on her patch, in Aberdeen, in the very week she returned from maternity leave.

The SNP has made clear that a vote for the SNP is a vote for the EU. The million or so Leave voters have an easy choice, and proportional representation will do the rest. The SNP will win the dubious honour of winning the European elections in Scotland. But in England another kind of populism, of the nativist right, is about to be born in the ashes of Brexit.